For You, the God of Grace

No matter the evils we face,

For us is the God of grace.

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By the grace of God the God of grace is for you and not against you.

It can seem as life’s circumstances swarm against us, and against the flow of rational sensibility, that we have a divine adversary. It may be true that we are under spiritual attack, but the grace of God is more than sufficient to cover every battle that makes its way against us.

This grace of God is gentle, yet powerful. Its power is in love, and not in what the world associates to power. This grace of God is palpably consistent; God never lets go, but his grace is effortless in the realm of the Divine.

For you is the grace of God whenever you choose to discern and do the will of him who empowers you in the spiritual realm. Obedience is the key, and obedience flows from trust, and trust is begotten of faith, and faith is fuelled by the reserves of purpose in hope.

Hope is our contribution in cooperation with the grace of God. And the dichotomy is this: when we feel hopeless and forlorn, we are to seek the resurrection afresh – believing that the Spirit of Christ can raise us in our affliction and take us into an invisible hope that generates the momentum of faith and the compulsion to trust and the ability to obey the will of him who we believe.

The God of grace is for us. The grace of God underpins our being when we obey God’s will, because we have trusted, because we have applied faith, because our hope is real in him who resurrects us.

Drinking Deeply of Hope

This is surely the key: hope.

Hope is the key to being resurrected. Whenever we access hope, afresh, out of the midst of hopelessness, we are, as a fact, resurrected. In this moment we live the resurrection of Jesus; we experience it. And having experienced it only a few times, and sometimes only once, it’s enough to believe it can happen again and again and again.

Suddenly there is purpose in hopelessness. We have our clear way out of it and now nothing can completely defeat us.

Drinking deeply of hope is about the search.

When we are beleaguered we must search. We must fight back. But we fight back through the gentleness of grace. There is no aggression in this fight. The search is full of faith to know that we have to keep searching. When we keep searching and knocking on God’s door, he will soon open that door and provide the way. Don’t give up.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.